Engineer Integrates Kinect with Garry's Mod

Yelp Engineering has made the dream of Kinect integration with Garry's Mod a reality and now it wants to see what you can do with it.

You know what Kinect is and if you're reading this, odds are that you know what Garry's Mod is, too. Wouldn't it be awesome if the two could be put together? That's exactly what John Boiles of Yelp Engineering has done with the help of OpenNI, the open source software released by PrimeSense, the company responsible for the 3D motion sensing technology in Kinect.

"OpenNI provides APIs for interacting with hardware as well as incorporating higher level computer vision modules that can recognize objects and gestures," he explained. "This allows us to solve really complex problems (like tracking skeletons in 3D space) very simply, since the heavy lifting is already done for us in OpenNI."

The Kinect integration with Garry's Mod consists of two parts, a backend based on one of the OpenNI example projects and a Lua script in Garry's Mod that parses the UDP packets generated by the backend. Boiles said that interfacing with Kinect through OpenNI is "super easy" but you'll have to take his word for it, since pretty much all of this technobabble is way above my pay grade.

It's fairly basic at this point but with the "proof of concept" complete, he is now giving away the code and inviting people to "branch it and hack it" into bigger and better things. Garry Newman, the creator of Garry's Mod, said on his blog that he'd love to see Boiles' creation included with future releases of his software. I'm betting we'll see some pretty cool things from this mod in very short order.